Sunday, July 31, 2011

Thursday, July 28

I hiked La Cruz this morning with my new friend (another guest in our house). We went so early that we had to wait about 5 minutes for La Policia to arrive so that it was safe. The view of Antigua and the volcano was spectacular! I hadn’t seen the volcano yet because the clouds roll in by mid-morning.

Then I went to the market and really went in all the way and wandered around. The one thing I saw that moved me the most was the coal aisle. Understand, the “aisles” we about one foot wide, with a constant flwo of people going in both directions. Anyhow, in the coal aisle were these tiny old looking women – in about 10 or so different little partitions – with nearly black hands and very leathery, wrinkled skin, sitting in sort crumpled looking position on the cement floor next to their pile of coal, some fast asleep. I wanted to take a picture, but it just didn’t feel right.

After my last class with Katia, I walked to the hotel where I was to meet my LHI group with, only to find that they had changed hotels. So I took the note and map that were left for me, found the new location, walked there still carrying with my 50 pound backpack on and carrying two more small backpacks, each weighing about 15 pounds. Katia had carried one with me to the first hotel, but then left for home before I’d found out that it had changed. Anyhow, I was relived to finally meet up with them!

We went out for dinner at a place called Rainbow Café that had great food and wonderful live music. After dinner a handful of us wandered around looking for good live music and a beer, which proved to be tricky at 9:00 because everyone was shutting down already. We did manage to hear a song and a half by a somewhat famous Cuban musician named Ignacio from the Buena Vista band.